Dana Student Worker Honored for His Poetry

Senior George Krikorian has stories, the kind, he says, that don’t lose their impact with retelling from one generation to the next. At the urging of his adviser, Major Jackson, Richard Dennis Green and Gold Professor of English and recipient of a 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship, Krikorian has been recording and transcribing hours of oral history from his grandmother, a first-generation American whose parents survived the Armenian Genocide.

“It was a brutal slaughtering of people,” Krikorian says. “You can still feel all of the emotion and pain.” Yet, he explains, it requires a level of emotional removal to craft the details into the kind of poems that won him this year’s Benjamin B. Wainwright Prize for poetry. “Krikorian’s work has a certain level of gravitas,” Jackson says. “It is some of the best writing that I have encountered since I started teaching here at UVM.”

April 24 commemorates the night in 1915 that ushered in the Armenian Genocide by the Turkish government. The following work by Krikorian puts the images that live within the lives of families into words: